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Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

Author: Nicholas Stroup

Dec 14 2021

PDH Capstone: Braiding the Threads

Posted on December 14, 2021March 15, 2022 by Nicholas Stroup

At the start of the capstone semester, I found myself following three disparate threads related to digital scholarship. The first was about determining when a digital project was complete. The second was about how digital work related to seeking external support. The third was about how to incorporate digital scholarship into traditional academic norms. With the end of the semester upon us, I reflect upon the semester of tying these frayed threads together and finding that the questions were not what I expected them to be at all.

First and foremost, finishing digital scholarship cannot be done in isolation. With all my engagements with The Studio, the clear message is that it takes the productive collision of content knowledge, methodological insight, technical prowess, and digital publishing experience to get such work to the world. No single person has all of these skills. In terms of answering the question of when digital work is complete, the most important thing I have learned is that this is a collaborative decision for all who are involved across these domains of expertise. For better or for worse, none of my digital projects from this semester are done. This is because the collaborations continue to flourish, and I have been in the process of unlearning the mechanisms of doing scholarship in a solitary manner. While I had asked what digital projects need to be pursued to completion, the proper question was probably: Who decides when a digital project is complete?

For external funding, however, a scope of work needs to be declared and deemed finished (or able to be finished). This semester, I reckoned with what funding sources would be most appropriate and what attached strings would be acceptable. Ultimately, I intended to seek grant support for on-site research in Europe that would have digital project outcomes. As the COVID-19 situation worsened in Europe, and particularly in the Western Balkans, it became less believable that travel would be possible for data collection and timely project completion. As such, applying for grant funding for speculative travel contingent on global health policy seemed like a fool’s errand. Why seek funding for projects that could never happen, or would be forever deferred? As such, though I earlier wondered about the implications about certain grant sources, the proper question was probably: How do the current structures of academic grantmaking predicated upon speculative project completion stifle digital humanistic modes of inquiry?

This understanding expanded my third question about how digital scholarship runs up against the barriers of academic convention. This semester, I have been negotiating the scope of my dissertation proposal and trying to consider ways to incorporate digital work into the scholarly endeavor. It seems like my experience of doing digital work, and the experiences of others who have attempted the same, point to digital projects as a frosting on the cake of traditional scholarly output, rather than being the cake itself. Early in the semester, I had asked the question about how to include digital work into my field of higher education and student affairs (HESA), approaching this as an initiative to put forward digital scholarship as a fundamental component of my dissertation. Now I ask: How to include a bit of digital work in the dissertation as a foundation for future projects?

Unfortunately, despite the inclusion of methodological approaches that lend themselves to digital scholarship (such as photovoice) entering our field’s academic discussion, I am still searching for any HESA dissertation that has made such digital work central to its scholarly contribution. As such, instead of seeking to challenge disciplinary convention in a dissertation format right now, I intend to take what I’ve learned about the ongoing nature of digital projects – and the resilience it takes to challenge academic funding norms –  into my next academic step. In the meanwhile, I hope to make the tastiest digital frosting I can to enhance my upcoming dissertation.

-Nick Stroup

Posted in PDH Certificate
Oct 14 2021

PDH Capstone: Following the Threads

Posted on October 14, 2021March 15, 2022 by Nicholas Stroup

When I began my wonderful entanglement with The Studio in 2018, I did not know what would result. I wanted to learn new digital methods, theorize about digital work in contemporary higher education, and become a bit more sophisticated when it came to doing work that would reach out beyond academic journals. As I mentioned in my second blog for The Studio Summer Fellowship, I never would have imagined that I would do research focusing on Kosovo, learn skills related digital mapping, or have to figure it all out during a global health emergency. Yet here we are.

Moving into this PDH Capstone semester, I found myself turning to a state of wonder as I follow three threads of digital engagement in my scholarly journey.

The first thread pushes me to return to the digital work I have already done. The maps I worked on during my summer fellowship need polishing. Some are worthy of showing off, but others need a bit more streamlining. Do I need them to be perfect to serve as a proof of concept for future digital work? I wonder whether a project that was intended to be (1) a platform for a personal learning experience, (2) a tool to help a research team visualize a difficult data set, and (3) a product for a very niche audience should now be leveraged in some new way. There is no doubt the work needs to be finished, but does it need to include features that show what I can do (beyond what it needs to do? I currently lean toward no, because that feels self-serving. At the same time, does small-scale digital scholarship beget larger digital scholarship based, in part, on the electronic traces it leaves in cyberspace? Must I leave a certain type of trace?

The second thread leaves me wondering how to write about the digital interdisciplinary work that I currently do in order to obtain grant funding. I cannot share much about the data I use on here at this time, but essentially my work relates to digitally curating a set of European educational policy data and using it to show how it affects students’ lives. Sure, I can model this data statistically, but it doesn’t then have the potential pack as much punch as visualizations do. That said, in order to garner enough support to protect my time to do this work, I have to write about my scholarship differently to apply for grants from data curation funds, education research funds, policy/political science research funds, or general international research funds. In addition to the disciplinary cultures this requires me to navigate, I must also consider how the grantmaking conventions differ from U.S. contexts to European contexts. I certainly do not have the protected time to do all this grant-seeking. Thus I wonder what kind of time investments do I want to make, whose patronage do I want, and how can I foresee the strings that are attached?

The third and final thread relates to the future scholarly work. As I approach the academic job market (I’ll graduate in 2023!), I wonder what to do as I become ever more aware that digital skills are not particularly valued in my discipline. While many doctoral students find their way to The Studio seeking pathways out of traditional academic careers, I still very much want to be a professor. I left a solid higher education career that I loved in order to make the educational investments needed to obtain a professor position – a choice I wholeheartedly stand behind. Along the way, in addition to the traditional research, teaching, and service work of an academic in my field, I found I enjoyed digital work, even though it doesn’t quite fit into the traditional boxes. As part of my capstone, I want to learn more about ways to incorporate explain DH work within my field of higher education and student affairs.

Weaving these three threads together, I wonder if it will take the types of “proof of concept” scholarly demonstrations mentioned above, or obtaining certain types grants, in order to obtain that faculty position. Or, I wonder, will it be necessary to pull away from doing digital work until I pass this period of scholarly precarity?

-Nick Stroup

Posted in PDH Certificate
Jul 23 2020

Lessons Learned Doing Digital Work

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Nicholas Stroup

Thanks to the Studio Summer Fellowship, I have had a deeply meaningful scholarly experience and learned four lessons about digital work in the academy.

 

 

Lesson 1: Value Process Over Product

My intention at the start of this summer was to build a map that visualized the recent history of the public higher education system in Kosovo. The digital product has become a reality, but that was not the greatest accomplishment of this journey. This experience protected my time to conduct research deeply, with invaluable dedicated hours to focus on process over product. As a result of this experience, I explored these data in a closer, richer way than ever before. By learning cartographic methods, I spotted trends that no table or graph generated from these data previously helped me to see. Most importantly, I developed confidence as a scholar, which will enhance my research and teaching.

Lesson 2: Welcome Creativity

When I began the project, I had an idea in my mind of how the completed map should look. After the first few weeks, the initial visualization started to resemble the image in my head, but the story that the data told lacked boldness. My Studio mentor, GIS Specialist Jay Bowen, suggested that instead of sticking with just the choropleth map, we could experiment with a creative representation of the data using proportional circles. After deviating from the initial vision, one of the important trends that was too subtle in the first draft became clear and compelling in the final version.

A revised map with proportional circle markers to represent gender differences in public university access

Lesson 3: Expect the Unexpected

During the weekly Fellows class, Dr. Stephanie Blalock asked us to reflect upon what surprised us during this experience. For me, the surprise was the accumulation of moments where I braced in anticipation of rough technological challenges but encountered support instead of roadblocks. These moments of relief outnumbered instances where I faced unexpected challenges. For example, I was really surprised when a rough map of Kosovo and all its municipalities appeared on my monitor for the first time after just a week. I thought that generating an image would take all summer! In the weeks that followed, each little map detail afforded the opportunity for custom design, and I had not expected that tailoring the map would involve just a bit of HTML or JavaScript, rather than some complicated procedure using the QGIS map-making software. The collective surprise of all these little a-ha moments made the experience immensely more satisfying, demystified the technology, and made the challenges that did emerge seem miniscule.

Lesson 4: Design with the Future in Mind

In reaching the final stage of the summer project timeline, the map does a decent job showing what is happening with public higher education but not why. Thus, the project cannot end in its current state. Realizing that I am running out of protected summer work time, I have made design choices that are suitable for scholarly presentation of data when our class of Studio Fellows presents at the 2021 Jakobsen Conference and that can accommodate future features about quality assurance policies in Kosovo when I am able to return to the project as a Public Digital Humanities Certificate capstone.

Newborn Monument, June 2019, Prishtinë

 

If you would like to get in touch with me about this research, the best way to reach me is by email at nicholas-stroup@uiowa.edu.

 

–Nicholas Stroup

Posted in Studio Fellows
Jun 29 2020

Mapping Public University Access in Kosovo

Posted on June 29, 2020July 2, 2020 by Nicholas Stroup

Can higher education access and higher education quality be improved at the same time? How can we visualize this difficult trade-off?

For the Studio summer fellowship, my technological goal is to learn how to build a choropleth map that includes a time slider element. The reason I want to learn this skill is to tell the story of the rapid enrollment changes at public universities in Kosovo. 

Initial gif Kosovo Map
The beginnings of the map project

At the start of the 2010s, as a measure to improve quality of higher education institutions, the Republic of Kosovo passed a regulation that effectively required that universities must employ three PhD-holders for each accredited degree program [1][2]. If a university could not maintain this requirement, the noncomplying program would lose accreditation and be prohibited from enrolling new students. For a country that founded its first university in 1970s, whose people experienced segregation and systematic exclusion from formal education in the 1980s, that faced war in the 1990s, and formally declared independence in the 2000s, there has not been much opportunity to build the quality national educational infrastructure required to mint new PhDs in Kosovo. As such, the three-PhD quality assurance requirement led to the dis-accreditation of degree programs around the country. While we have some idea of what this quality assurance policy has meant for the degree programs, what has this meant for students – or potential students – across Kosovo?

National Library of Kosovo
Biblioteka Kombëtare e Kosovës “Pjetër Bogdani”

As a student at Iowa, I feel a deep connection to Kosovo. Iowa and Kosovo have a Sister State relationship, Kosovo was the first country to open a foreign consulate in Iowa, and the connections between sectors in our two states offer a unique approach for post-conflict development work. Given the young population of Kosovo (the median age is 30.5) and the labor market issues young Kosovars face (youth unemployment rate presently at 49.4%), the work of understanding how higher education serves today’s students in Kosovo is an urgent matter [3][4]. Mobilizing the resources of the University of Iowa through this fellowship seems like a small way I can contribute to developing this understanding.

View over Prizren, Kosovo
The historic city of Prizren

In just the initial weeks of the project, with the skillful guidance of GIS Specialist Jay Bowen, I have already learned some technical vocabulary (like the word ‘choropleth’!) and acquired several digital tools to make a rudimentary map to help tell this story. Over the course of the upcoming weeks, I hope to polish this map into a format that can be useful for educational leaders in Kosovo seeking to improve both quality and access in the new nation.

-Nick Stroup

 

References

[1] Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. (2013). Administrative instruction: No. 0212013 for accreditation of higher education institutions in the republic of Kosova. MEST website: https://masht.rks-gov.net/uploads/2016/01/02-2013-ua-mbi-akreditimin-e-institucioneve.pdf

[2] National Qualification Authority. (2016). EQF referencing report of the Kosovo national qualification framework for general education, VET, and higher education. National Qualification Authority website: https://akkks.rks-gov.net/uploads/kosovo_eqf_referencing_report_2016.pdf

[3] Central Intelligence Agency. (2020). Kosovo. In The world factbook. CIA website: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kv.html

[4] Kosovo Agency of Statistics. (2020). Labor force survey in Kosovo, 2019. Kosovo Agency of Statistics website: https://ask.rks-gov.net/en/kosovo-agency-of-statistics/add-news/labor-force-survey-in-kosovo-2019

 

Posted in Studio Fellows

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